The days you least anticipate you find a subject which holds its
own with the work of those who have gone before us.
—LETTER TO THEO, MID-NOVEMBER 1889
EVICTED FROM HIS yellow house and anxious about his health, Vincent turned to his friends for advice. The postman Roulin, who had visited him every day in the hospital, couldn't help. He'd been transferred to a new district and would be leaving town. Dr. Rey offered Vincent a small apartment in his house, but Vincent worried about his ability to live alone. As a last resort, a local Protestant minister named Sailes, whom Theo had enlisted to check on Vincent, suggested he consider a mental institution in the town of St.-Rémy, about fifteen miles away. Vincent decided to apply for admission with the understanding that he be allowed to paint. Theo assured him it was just for a rest, that he would soon recover.
There have been many differing theories about Vincent's condition, and much has been written about it. The director of the hospital in St.-Rémy wrote on his admission form that in his opinion Vincent suffered from “acute mania, with hallucinations of sight and hearing which have caused him to mutilate himself by cutting off his ear.… My opinion is that Monsieur van Gogh is subject to epileptic fits at very infrequent intervals.”
Was he a lunatic? A dangerous madman? If so, how could he have painted such extraordinary masterpieces, especially during his stay in the asylum? The most popular theory, generally accepted, is that he suffered from an unusual form of epilepsy, possibly complicated by the effects of absinthe or digitalis poisoning. Today there is medication for epilepsy, but then none existed, and those who suffered from it found no relief. Certainly there were moments when Vincent lost his reason, but he was not insane. Other than the weeks when he was incapacitated from an attack, he painted masterpieces and wrote intelligent, thoughtful letters about them. Between attacks he sometimes lacked energy and felt weak and nervous, but his creative ability was not affected.
Completely lucid when he arrived at the asylum, Vincent described his surroundings in precise detail. Originally a monastery in medieval times, St.-Paul-de-Mausole, as it was called, stood at the edge of a charming little village surrounded by olive groves and tall cypress trees, two miles from the craggy limestone hills called the Alpilles. “I have never been so peaceful as here and in the Hospital in Arles—to be able to paint a little at last. Quite near here there are some little mountains, gray and blue, and at their foot some very green cornfields and pines. I shall count myself very happy if I can manage to work enough to earn my living. For it worries me a lot when I think I have done so many pictures and drawings without ever selling one.”
From his small cell with its faded green flowered curtains, he looked through the bars on his window and watched the sun rising on a square field of wheat. He painted scenes from that window but never included the bars. With only ten male patients, there were thirty empty rooms in the dormitory, so he received permission to use one of them as a studio. He tried to adapt to his constricted new life. “The food,” he wrote, “tastes rather moldy, like a cockroach-infested restaurant in Paris.… As these poor souls do absolutely nothing (not a book, nothing to distract them but a game of bowls and a game of checkers), they stuff themselves with chick peas, beans, and lentils.” This, he joked, caused a few digestive problems.
He ventured from his cell to paint in the courtyard, bordered by an overgrown garden. A profusion of irises had caught his eye. He set up his easel near the fountain to paint masses of purple petals glowing against the emerald foliage and azure sky. The other patients watched him from a respectful distance. Later, as he moved through the long, arched hallways of the hospital, he heard their cries. Sensitive to human suffering, Vincent tried to comfort the other inmates, often staying with them when they had attacks. He listened to the descriptions of their symptoms, amazed that they, too, heard voices and saw distorted shapes.
“I think I have done well to come here; first of all, by seeing the reality of the life of the various lunatics and madmen in this menagerie, I am losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to look upon madness as a disease like any other.” He was able to see the effects of epilepsy on several of the patients, which helped him understand his own condition. Optimistic by nature, Vincent chose to make the best of the situation, to benefit from the regularity of his life there. But sometimes the pitiful behavior of the patients depressed him. They shouted constantly, tore off their clothes, and smashed furniture. Other than soaking in a tub of cold water for two hours twice a week, they received no treatment for their illness. It upset him that Dr. Peyron, the director of the asylum, had so little motivation to improve the situation.
After a month he talked Peyron into allowing him to go out into the surrounding fields to paint. An attendant went along with him. With new oils and canvas sent by Theo, Vincent immersed himself in the beauty of the countryside. “Since it is just the season when there is an abundance of flowers and thus the color effects,” he wrote to Theo, “it might be wise to send me another five meters of canvas.” He muted the violent colors of the previous summer as a way of seeking a calmer mood for himself. Drawn to the tall cypress trees, he said, “They have not been done the way I see them.”
Road with Cypress and Star, with its dynamic shapes and thick application of paint, shows Vincent at the height of his powers. It is his most dramatic painting of a subject that dominated his attention in St.-Rémy. Here he reached his goal to paint a “modern” landscape by representing the spirit of a place, rather than simply picturing a tree. The somber form of the tree is like a portrait—a lonely giant against a brooding landscape. Perhaps the lone tree spiraling into an agitated sky matched the state of his own mind.
By mid-July he had completed an astonishing number of artworks: thirty-one paintings and forty drawings. “What is a drawing?” he asked. “It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.” Drawn with a reed pen, his sketches of cypress trees are masterful, filled with pulsating spirals, short curvy strokes, and contrasting light and dark lines. Patterns of dots and overlapping curlicues give the drawings the rich effect that color achieves in painting. His works in St.-Rémy incorporated these qualities, producing a sense of movement and energy.
He felt he might be cured, even though Dr. Peyron told him he would need to stay there at least a year. But he had reason to feel optimistic, as he was able to work all day. He spent his evenings reading in English the historical plays of William Shakespeare, sent by Theo.
Then one day he opened a letter from Theo and read that Theo and Jo were expecting a baby. Nothing in Vincent's letters supports the notion that he was jealous. Perhaps he worried about Theo's financial support. But a few weeks later, after an upsetting visit to Arles to retrieve some of his paintings, he suffered a severe seizure. He began hallucinating and tried to swallow his paints. Quickly his attendant restrained him. Afterward Vincent couldn't remember what had happened. But he did write, “When you suffer much … the very voices seem to come from afar. During the attacks I experience this to such a degree that all the persons I see then, even if I recognize them … seem to come toward me out of a great distance, and to be quite different from what they are in reality.”
He avoided working outside again for two months and refused to leave his bedroom. His mind might have been clear, but he felt weak and demoralized. When he started drawing again, the nuns who worked at the asylum would not return his paints. They realized Vincent was an artist, but he was hardly famous, and his works were strange enough to be dismissed.
As someone brought up in the austere Dutch Reformed Church, Vincent found the faith of the nuns superstitious and stifling. It so disturbed him that he began to experience frightening religious hallucinations. Yet after each attack he rallied, forcing himself to “eat like two now, work hard, and limit my relations with the other patients for fear of a relapse. I am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit suicide, and finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.”
Away from his friends and family in an alien place, he became homesick, and thoughts of his childhood and the landscape of Brabant, the family garden, the little graveyard, and the church haunted him. He made a number of drawings from memory. The looming cypress in The Starry Night can be found in the south of France, but the tall church steeple in the small village nestled at the foot of the mountains is Dutch. From memory and from life, he combined these two settings purposefully to create a lasting impression, not simply a pretty scene. Looking at the stars swirling in the night sky produces a dizzying effect, as if the artist were painting an ecstatic vision. Although this painting departed from reality, it was no hallucination. In this carefully worked-out composition, the vigorous lines were inspired by German woodcuts. It symbolized for Vincent a deeply spiritual mood. The Starry Night is bolder and more visionary than the night paintings done in Arles. There he concentrated on color; in St.-Rémy line became the insistent element. When he sent the painting to Theo, his brother didn't comment on the sky but only on the familiar landscape.
Jo gave birth to a son, naming him Vincent Willem after his uncle, and Theo asked Vincent to be the godfather. Vincent didn't feel up to traveling, but he painted a beautiful canvas of almond branches against a blue sky for the new baby, as if the child lying in the cradle were looking up through flowering arms.
Almost as soon as he'd finished the canvas, he had another attack and was “down like a brute … Difficult to understand things like that,” he said, “but alas.” Practically overnight he recovered and was back at his easel Purple irises, olive orchards, and later the mountains occupied him as well as a few portraits, including Mrs. Roulin (from memory) and Trabuc, the asylum's head attendant. Theo sent him prints by Daumier and Millet to copy. Millet's painting The Sower, with its theme of peasant life, inspired more than twenty works. Vincent wrote, “I am trying to do something to console myself, for my own pleasure.”
Just as the Sower paintings symbolized a life-giving force, his paintings of the Reaper stood for death. “I see in this reaper—a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task—I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping.… But there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.”
Like many artists or writers who have felt exiled from their own countries, Vincent was highly sensitive to his surroundings. In St.-Rémy his paintings of the cypress trees, the olive groves, and the mountains were meant to express the essence of the south, offering “at best a sort of whole, ‘Impressions of Provence.’” During his year in the asylum, between some debilitating attacks, he averaged two paintings a week, along with detailed descriptions in letters to Theo about his progress.
In the winter of 1890 a brilliant young critic, G. Albert Aurier, saw Vincent's paintings at Père Tanguy's shop and at Theo's apartment in Paris. Dazzled by Vincent's powerful style, Aurier wrote a glowing article about him in an avant-garde magazine, Mercure de France, calling him “a terrible maddened genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque.” This was the first published article written about Vincent, who, instead of rejoicing, wrote Theo, “Please ask M. Aurier not to write any more articles on my painting… it pains me more than he knows.” But it wasn't being called “maddened” that upset him. Vincent thought Aurier had been too flattering and that others, such as Gauguin, deserved more praise.
Because of Aurier's article, six of Vincent's paintings were sent to an exhibition in Brussels. There The Red Vineyard was purchased for 400 francs. Even though Vincent traded paintings and sold a few drawings during his lifetime, The Red Vineyard is often referred to as the only real sale he ever made. His friend Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as Renoir and Cézanne, had paintings in the exhibition. When a Belgian artist called Vincent's pictures the work of an ignoramus, Toulouse-Lautrec challenged him to a duel, but the French contingent stepped in to stop him.
Almost immediately after the sale, Vincent suffered a relapse. “As soon as I heard that my work was having some success, and read the article,” he wrote to his mother, “I feared at once I should be punished for it.… Success is the worst thing that can happen in a painter's life.” This reaction to praise echoes his behavior as a little boy when he tore up a drawing his mother admired.
Spring arrived, marking a year since he had admitted himself to the asylum. Now he obsessed about leaving. “I must make a change, even a desperate one.” He knew he couldn't risk living alone, so letters went back and forth between him and Theo about his various options. Gauguin, who was living in Brittany, politely refused to offer him a room, telling friends later, “Not that man! He tried to kill me!” Perhaps, Vincent wrote Theo, he could stay with the painter Camille Pissarro, who had been so kind to him in Paris, But Pissarro's wife, the tougher of the couple, said she was afraid to have him around her children.
The fatherly Pissarro came up with a solution. He knew of a small town about twenty miles from Paris called Auvers-sur-Oise where a physician named Dr. Gachet resided. This doctor, he said, was sympathetic to artists and knew a little about psychiatry. So it was decided that Vincent would go north again. This move proved to be his last.